Online bulletin board systems (BBS) and discussion group boards are well-known in the art. Surprisingly, however, over the past 15 years or so they have failed to evolve significantly in sophistication and/or ease of use. In fact, compared to the developments made in applications software, user interfaces, internet browsers, etc., online message boards are still remarkably primitive.
At this time, some popular stock discussion boards known to applicants are located on the internet at web sites maintained by Dejanews, Yahoo!, Motley Fool, Silicon Investor, Raging Bull and Remarq.
Of these, the fool.com board website maintained by an organization known as “The Motley Fool” is probably the most technologically sophisticated and user-friendly. However, this message board, as with each of the boards above, is constricted by the fact that it relies on HTML coding, which, while easy to implement on the provider side, is relatively static, and not extremely functional from the user's perspective. HTML is also easily handled by conventional user web browsers as well, and this is another reason why it is in widespread use.
A conventional prior art message board is illustrated in FIGS. 1A and 1B. As seen here, an interface 100 for an internet service provider permits the user to visualize a display area 110 which includes a number of posted messages 115 for a particular subject, which, in this case, involves company A. These posted messages are generated by users having access to the website maintained by the service provider, and can include information, commentary, etc., on any one of a variety of different subjects pertaining to company A, such as, for example, discussions of recent stock movements, products offered, press releases, etc. The users (subscribers) of the service provider compose these messages at their local computer systems, and then send (post) the same to a server at the website, where they are screened (usually for improper content), indexed (to identify topic, author, date, etc.) and stored for later retrieval by other users. Each message, therefore, is posted by a user-author within the logical area for Company A according to topic, and date, and such information is usually displayed in a region 115 of display area 110. A list of such messages, therefore, appears to the user when he/she visits the message board, and selects the logical area reserved for Company A. This list for Company A can be organized by topic, author, date, etc. by clicking an activation button associated with each of the labels “Topic,” “Author” and/or “Date.” An additional set of control buttons 125 can be used by the user to perform such functions as “Request”—i.e., to retrieve the message highlighted by the cursor (the entry marked in shaded form), “Create”—which allows the user to compose a new message for the topic in question, and “Find” which allows the user to search the list of messages in the topic area for selected content. As seen further in FIG. 1b, when the user Requests a particular message, display area 110 is replaced by a different display area 130, which shows the user the message entry in question. At this point, the user can read the content of the message as provided in area 135, and can then respond to the same by activating a “Reply” button 140. This has the effect, of course, of posting yet another message under the topic in question, identified with an author name corresponding to the user.
This message board system, while commonly used in the industry, is not extremely functional or user friendly. First, from a high level perspective, when first visiting the message board, the user is presented with a first screen as seen in FIG. 1C which forces them to select from a broad area of subjects broken down as Company A, Company B, Company C, etc. This means that a decision must be made by the user early on to narrow the focus of his/her query, and this restricts their later retrieval of relevant material that may be of interest to them. Accordingly, it is not extremely accurate or flexible, since the user must return to this first search staging area anytime they want to change subjects.
Second, assuming that the user is at the second stage of the prior art search interface shown in display area 110, and wants to examine a particular message, display area 110 vanishes from his/her view, so they are unable to jump to any other arbitrary selected message located within the topic area. Instead, the user is confined to moving through the messages (using interface 130, which is essentially yet a third stage of the interface) sequentially, typically using the “Prior” and “Next” buttons shown in area 140, which have the effect of moving backwards/forwards respectively through the list of messages for the topic. Since the display list of all the posted messages from the second stage is now out of sight, the user can experience significant frustration in trying to find another message that may have caught his/her attention during the time they were examining display area 110. The alternative, of course, is to close area 130 and return to the display area 110, and this option does allow the user to see the list again. This alternative is not attractive, however, since it requires additional keystrokes, and has the effect of now closing area 130 so it is no longer visible by the user.
In short, there is no easy way in the art to browse through messages on a bulletin board in random access fashion, or to see both a message list and content for a particular message at the same time. Also, the user must constantly transcend different stages of visual interfaces to move about during the search process, because such stages do not exist in any integrated, harmonized fashion.
Third, while the user is at the second stage of the search process, he/she is limited to seeing the messages in display area 110 as they are stored at the website; in other words, indexed by Topic, Author, Date, etc., but with no additional screening/filtering capability. This means that the user is sometimes (depending on popular the topic is) forced to browse through hundreds of messages (postings) to find an item of interest. While the prior art does allow some searching capability within this second stage, it is relatively primitive in that it cannot transcend the logical area bound by messages for Company A; in other words, it is not possible to search across all subjects for a keyword of interest. Again, this means that the user is not receiving complete information, and this detracts from the appeal of such system. Also, the search constructs possible with the prior system are very limited, and do not allow for advance filtering techniques, so that, for example, the user can use multiple filters to find content. For instance, locating postings by a specific author having specific keywords is not possible at this time. Moreover, within this second stage, the user must formulate and define his/her own search queries for each new query, and then pass this request to the service provider, where it is processed to return relevant hits to the user. This can take time, of course, and because this portion of the interface has no “memory”—in the sense of remembering the user's predilections and search interests/constructs —the user is required to waste time each time he/she visits this stage to re-formulate the search query to retrieve messages of interest. It would be far more advantageous, for example, if the interface could learn, remember, and automate common query and filtering criteria from the user.
These and other noticeable limitations reduce the utility and utilization of message boards, and this in turn results in a number of adverse consequences for service providers, including fewer subscribers, reduced revenue, etc. These limitations, are due, in large part, to limitations in HTML, which do not provide for easy creation and manipulation of active display areas for the user. While other implementations of message boards might provide additional functionality beyond that described for the example above, applicants are nonetheless unaware of any message boards that provide flexible but comprehensive user selection of content.
Furthermore, while more advanced and useful interfaces exist for other applications, they have not been successfully adapted to date in connection with a message board system. For example, a conventional commercial news reader by Netscape is illustrated generally in FIG. 1D. This program has the advantage of a flexible interface for reviewing news stories, but does not provide any intelligent support for multiple levels of bulletin board message organization, message querying, etc. In other words, the content sources (on the left side of the screen) are simply newsgroups, which represent data that is in raw, unorganized and non-descriptive form as posted by various individuals within such newsgroups. The user is left to guess and wonder about the nature and scope of the various selections (newsgroups), and/or what subject matter, classes, sub-classes, etc., are within such selections. As the message items are created by individuals, it is often the case that these message items are not placed within an appropriate category (newsgroup), because the user does not have the time, interest or inclination to make certain that his/her message is placed in the right area for others to see it. Thus, the raw data examined by such interface is not intelligently created ab initio, and this means that it is not classified or managed (i.e. by subject matter/class, or in accordance with groupings that might be more germane to a particular community of users). This lack of organization in the content, of course, handicaps the functionality of the interface as well. Consequently, while this interface has some apparent advantages that could be imparted to bulletin board systems, it does not provide an optimal solution to the overall problem of identifying relevant content for a group of users, and then providing a tool for easily locating and browsing through such content.
Unlike most other application programs, most prior art online message boards have no flexible front end; thus, it is extremely difficult to identify, cull out and review large collections of unorganized messages. Moreover, the content presented at such sites, and the ways for presenting such content to subscribers, is left entirely to the discretion of the service provider. There is no effort made to intelligently monitor the needs, interests, etc., of the subscribers, and/or to find/tailor content (and/or its expression) based on such observations. Accordingly, such online message board systems do not truly or accurately reflect the needs, interests, etc., of its users, which reduces their appeal and attractiveness to users. This in turn means reduced advertising revenues and/or subscriber fees.
These limitations in prior art message boards have also inhibited true electronic “community” based mass sharing and learning of information content. In other words, the apparent initial promise of the Internet to bring together thousands of users so that they can collectively share information, opinions, insights, lessons, etc., has not been effectively realized to date. In large part this is due to a combination of factors, including the fact that information content from users and other sources is not created initially or maintained by service providers in a manner that makes it efficiently processable for user perusals. Even then, as noted above, retrieving this information in any intelligent fashion is stilted significantly by limitations in the search/retrieval interface engines of current bulletin board systems used by service providers. In short, there is an abundance of data online that would be of interest to broad classes of users, but no easy way to extract meaningful information, because it must be manually reviewed in inefficient ways. Accordingly, the creation of true collective intelligence electronic communities would be considerably enhances by a system that gathers and stores information from the community members automatically and intelligently, and then permits users in such community to be able to easily, flexibly and controllably glean and share selected insight from the experience, opinions, actions and facts from other users.
Tying all these factors together, it is apparent, too, that there is considerable need for an improved online service that integrates an intelligent data collection and indexing system with a more functional, easy to use front end interface for analyzing such data.